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News Center: the place to go if you look for news

General idea

Very often dashboards or space homepages display news. But usually they don't display all the news, but a certain part of the news. Maybe your dashboard shows only news from corporate communications, or only those news labelled with a specific label or news category.

Before Linchpin Enterprise News 2.2 there's really no place to see all the news created in your Confluence. You could use Confluence search to find a specific news item, but that doesn't help if you mainly remember the teaser image that had been used.

Well, the News Center is a remedy for all that: One place for all the news - even blog posts from personal spaces are included, if your administrator activated that option. You can search for specific terms and filter down your results using a variety of filters.

Where to find the News Center

Usually you'll find a link to the News Center on top of your browser window within the application header of Confluence.

If you are using the Linchpin Theme Plugin in your Confluence, the link is part of the footer.

It might be there's an additional link to the News Center somewhere on your dashboard; some administrators might put it there manually as a button or teaser element.

If all else fails, you can reach it by entering the URL in your browser directly:

Using the search

Initially the News Center will show you all the news. Please note: If a news item is set to sticky status, this doesn't show in the News Center. The order is strictly chronological.

Using the search iworks exactly the same as using the Confluence search: Enter a search term, hit enter or click the search icon, and the overview will show you all the news containing this search term. If you enter two terms, the overview will show all news containing both terms.

This search considers the title, content, kicker line and intro text of a news item. To search for things like categories or labels, you'll use the filters as described below.

If you want to revert to showing all the news, simply empty the search input field and hit enter again.

Clicking on the icons on the right above the search results you can switch between a news tile view and a text only view. If you don't see these icons, your administrator has restricted the usage to the one or the other view.

Using Filters

Which and how many filters are available depends on the configuration your administrator made. In this guide we'll cover the five possible filter types, from left to right as shown on the screenshot.

The names of the available filters are set by the administrator, so our examples may very well differ from what you are seeing in your News Center.

Filter by space

If this filter type is available, you can filter down your search results to all the news belonging to certain spaces. Simply click into the filter field, start typing the name of the desired space and select one from the dropdown that appears. If you want to add another space to your selection, repeat this process. You can add as many spaces as you like. Well, you cannot add more spaces than exist in your Confluence, though.

If you select several spaces, the result will be filtered down to news that are from space A OR space B OR space C and so on.

Filter by category

This filter type works much the same. It just offers news categories rather than spaces.

If you select several categories, the result will be filtered down to news that belong to category A OR category B or category C and so on.

Filter by label

The labels filter works identically to space and category filters. It offers Confluence labels.

Several labels narrow down your search results to news tagged with label A OR label B OR label C and so on.

Filter by author

In this filter you can select one or several users and will be shown only news published by those users.

If this also shows news or rather blog posts from their personal spaces depends on whether your administrator activated that option.

Filter by date

Enter a start and end date. The search results will be narrowed down to news published on or between those two dates.

If you leave the "from" field empty, that means "starting with the oldest available news".

Leaving empty the "to" field means "until today"

If you combine two or more filters, imagine an "AND" between them.

Let's say you selected space A and space B in the first filter, and category A in the second filter. The search results in this case would contain all news from (space A OR space B) AND category A.

A last note on filters: It may happen that you cannot select certain spaces, labels or news categories from the filters, even though you know they exist. In this case, your administrator has limited the filter when configuring the News Center.